2021 Review: Should You Get The UniFi Protect System?

tom here from lauren systems and we're going to talk about unifi protect here in may of 2021. is it still a good system to use what are some of the pros and cons we're going to dive into that but first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you like to hire a short project there's a hire us button right on the top if you'd like to help out this channel other ways there's some affiliate links down below and just other ways to contact and connect with us or engage with us on our forums all that fun stuff link down below or head over to our website lawrencesystems.com but unifi protect let's talk about this now quick history unified video was the original product and we started getting into a lot of the cameras and everything else and then that product unfortunately was discontinued and that left a you know sour taste to a lot of people including myself but unifi seems to have done a good job on the protect system and offered a migration path for all those cameras we installed now at first that migration path was a little rocky because the only thing that had originally came with protect were the unifi cloud keys which by the way they run protect but not much protect because you can't hook too many cameras up to these they're not very powerful they're neat they're exist but in terms of the overall use case yeah they're not that great but then they released the unifi nvr and that turned out to be a solid product i was very skeptical i have a review i'll link to on that product but it's actually turned out to be well a solid performer that's actually reliable and easy to update and just works so let's dive into the pros and cons and before we go too far let's first talk about what does all this stuff cost and where do you buy it from i think we need to start there because a lot has changed the way unify sells things a lot of this was sold on amazon previously and for the most part um yeah they've removed it all from amazon and there's two places you can get unified from large resellers so when we're buying a large quantity of unified equipment there are specific channel partner resellers we've worked with to get some of the deals on things but um don't call us for these things that are out of stock right here in may of 2021 we're aware they're out of stock our vendors can't get any more of them either so mostly what unify and for most end users or more small deployments you'll want to buy these direct from unifi if you want the good warranty there was a lot of gray label stuff i guess you could say gray market uh being sold and it caused a lot of confusion on the amazon store that's my understanding of why they got rid of it i don't know unifies never directly said it but i know there was always confusion on warranty on where the stuff had come from whether it was refurbished or whatnot so i believe that's why they went to a pretty much a direct sales model so you buy everything from unified direct one good thing about the unified protect system though is it does not have any subscription so you don't have to worry about when you buy it then going up and then signing up and paying recurring fees this is one of the first things that kind of sets them apart from a lot of the other consumer products and i would still compare these to more of the consumer market you know like a ring doorbell versus a unified doorbell or any of the other competitors out there that make similar doorbells to ring most of these companies all focus on the subscription service they don't really care about selling you any type of equipment other than to get you to subscribe to their ever increasing costs on what these things cost per month to add for each camera you add and things like that they want to sell subscriptions unifi's goal is to sell hardware so when you buy the unifi nvr you can then use the unifi cameras but that is kind of a vendor lock and ecosystem so you kind of have to commit to it if you have a couple other non-unified cameras you like to tie them to the unifi nvr i'm sorry they will not work there's probably someone who will point out there's some hacky project to try to get them to work i've seen things like this i don't recommend it and i mean i recommend playing with things all the time but it's not something i would try to support commercially or guarantee to work it's just a fun hobby project at that point but if you buy the unified cameras all the unified cameras that are sold on their site are completely compatible with their unifi nvr without any subscription and these cameras also don't work nice with other nvrs they're not supporting any open standards that are in rtsp which is not the best way to stream data off so i don't recommend buying just these cameras and plugging into another nvr matter of fact the camera someone may say are kind of pricey yes but then when you tie in licensing fees that some of the other nvr platforms have they become a little bit more reasonable the price on these in my opinion has the license fee built in i guess you could say but at least the licenses are perpetual if you want to look at it that way as in you buy it once and they work without having to go buy you know another license or worry about a license expiring that especially when you get into the commercial market is a challenge now the lineup of cameras they have is pretty nice other than the problems that i don't know if it's a direct unify can't manufacture these fast enough demand problem or the chip shortage that we're facing here in 2021 unify not being the most forthcoming company about what's going on we just know that these have been out of stock especially this really cool i love this unifi protect g3 instant camera we've been playing with it for months i haven't really reviewed it because i didn't want to get people excited about a product that is really hard to get your hands on i will say i like it of course it works as expected but having a 29 full hd wi-fi camera perfect except getting one is really really challenging so a few of these are still out of stock right now you may be watching the future and going what other stock problem anyways hopefully that's true and these are easy to get because setting a few of these up around your house means you can get a really nice budget system now what do you record on the unifi protect network video recorder i've reviewed this device before it supports up to 50 cameras and yeah they're reliable we've actually deployed quite a few of these as a replacement for the defunct now unified video platform and of every client we put their system in as a replacement has been really happy we haven't had any update issues we haven't any these go bad we've actually had zero that we've had to return i'm not saying that's an absolute guarantee that there's never been a failure out there i'm just saying all the units we've bought which has been quite a few of them we have not had any problems with it we've also consulted on a lot of projects where we've helped people install these it's in the hundreds not thousands that we've installed so that's you know a small slice of the overall market but at least i can tell you that so far experience has actually been quite good with these now the unified cloud key is uh still an option if someone said i have like a camera and a doorbell but it's not something i really ever push people to because right away as soon as you get one camera you go i'd like three more or another one over here and this is where the unified cloud key just falls short it to me it's just not a powerful enough system to really handle it if you have a situation where you only want one doorbell installed it'd probably work fine i don't know how well it would work though if you wanted to put a doorbell and 10 cameras it may claim to support a few cameras but yeah our experience with it has been less than great when it comes to that same thing with the unified dream machine it seems to handle the unified video okay it's an option but the unified dream machine pro only has single hard drive so there's no resiliency and same thing with the cloud key single hard drive no resiliency if there's any problems so our go to is the unifi protect recorder now at 299 for the recorder i don't think that's unreasonable uh the web interface you get and everything works really well the application works well and actually let's just go right over and take a look at the unifi protect system actually start at the dashboard and since i reviewed this originally i've actually been impressed with the updates because well it has more features especially the new dashboard with smart detect here is my son walking out of the building because we've got smart detect and it detects people it didn't inspect vehicles i'm hoping in the future they're going to have a lot more options they have but you can see it puts a little blue box tracking him walk by and then for him he's in the studio here where i set these cameras up these cameras are actively connected to my system so now it'll show yes now you're looking at how i see things there's me walking by and there's my son walking by and you're that's actually the camera that you're looking at the tv that's behind it pretty slick and then the vehicle detection these are vehicles that have come by or went by and it grabs and can see these vehicles as they go around the back where i have the smart detection turned on and actually we'll make this bigger so you can see it this is the camera at the back of the office and it detected the vehicle right there these can also be set in summary this is just a neat feature because you go down here and go smart detections and it says person vehicle person vehicle like i said i hope and they add more in the future but this allows you instead of just saying a motion notification to do a specific notification and to go a step further they've also created a granular system to choose which camera and whether you want an email or a push notification for the app whether you want to be a smart notification or a motion notification and of course these are the camera disconnect options they've really done a good job of putting this together so you can say all right i want to know when my office is closed for example when someone walks by the rear door because they probably shouldn't be there when the office is closed so you can set those type of notifications to be sent to your phone and once again this is that granular thing they've really added that makes it really nice there are systems that offer features like this the higher end nvr systems but now you start talking about the price going up or they're often one of the ones that charge a subscription service to be able to have features like that this is where i kind of really for these small businesses that we put these into small offices and things like that it's really nice now they've also done granular user permissions so you can create different users and then kind of say all right they can only view maybe a couple of the inside cameras or maybe only the outside cameras so once again they give you some level of control over that and finally from an install standpoint when you set these up i don't need to know anything about their firewall it does connect to the unifi cloud server the app connects to unifi cloud server does have a local option i can still log into this locally if i want but the ability to connect it to your cloud server not map any ports not have to open up the firewall it automatically goes to the unify ui site no weird certificate to click through no plug-ins to load if you remember any of the older you know especially the less expensive nvr has always required internet explorer and some plug-in or i've even seen some that used uh variations on activex objects and flash and weird things like that that just aren't really compatible with modern computer systems unifi is all just standard web-based system and then the app that works on both ios and on android works really well whether they're inside the office or not the system is smart enough to realize when they're connecting locally versus when they're connecting remotely now from the technician standpoint our standpoint from setting these up for clients all you need to do to adopt a camera is put them all on the same network so we'll build out a camera network for a client put all the devices on that same network we adopt them in that lower labor means there's a lower cost for us to install these in a client's office so ease of use because you want something your clients can use without having to call you you have to think about this when you're putting these in for businesses you know if i wanted this little four person outfit maybe a small insurance company we installed one of these for we don't really want them to be trying to figure out a complicated system just to view if someone walked in the door we've installed these uh larger installs for a couple trucking companies they're you know about 15 20 cameras no problem for them pizza places yeah they love them because once again it's really simple for them to look you know when did someone come in the lobby door when did someone stop by the front of the office and when is someone hanging out then they shouldn't be behind the building this is actually a direct use case we've had for a couple of them uh where that was one of the challenges and they actually found it really intuitive and easy to use and they're not necessarily not picking on them it's just not what they do they're not very tech savvy so having a simplistic system that doesn't require a lot of support worked out really well and for us to go out and install them without having to do anything more than just throw a bunch of cameras on the same network worked out really well so my overall feelings on unifi protect is it's a solid system the enhancements they've had over the years have done well the especially features like and i'll leave links to the other videos because i've uh done reviews of these like when you look at the devices it's labeled magic video tube it's called the viewport and you can see it behind me that's how we're able to change the camera views and it changes almost instantly so if i need to go in here swap it to a different set of cameras set motion options set what it shows on there and you can have multiple of these on a single nvr this has been one of those extra things from an installer standpoint they're just plugging in network adapters the unified viewport works over the network we can control it remotely so if they say hey can you change tv too we label it tv2 we can remotely go in there and change it from a technician management standpoint makes that really easy to use we just go in here choose which of the settings we want you're actually watching in real time change right behind my head again they've done a solid job of all these little features that make for a good overall system now last couple things we'll look at in here is the time lapse this is the one thing that i wish was a little bit faster i specifically like here's the van going by and if we try to play back and actually let's specifically go to the g4 pro here time lapse one of the problems is and this is all the g4 pro it's seeking reasonably fast when i do it this way but let's try and play something back at a higher speed it's going to start struggling a little bit i was really wishing they'd give us a faster nvr it's still completely usable i can still completely download and export things out of there but when there's a lot of videos in a row the system does kind of chug a little bit that's the one downside i guess you could say about these is it's not quite as fast as i think it should be and i wish they had an option where instead of 299 maybe 5.99 i could buy a faster processor in the especially if someone had a bunch of high-res cameras and like i said it works but yeah you know this still goes into use unify experience in there now a couple downsides of these systems that some people may not like yes it does require you to register with the unifi cloud in order to get these things set up that's just the way this system works second limited choices in nvr if someone needed a system spec out that was more than 50 cameras the nvr not an option this is the max it supports and are not stackable so if we have a hundred camera system i would have to sell two nbrs and then log into two separate systems now you can tie the systems to one account to make that easier but that's normally not the same as a nice stackable system that would be able to display all 50 cameras also when someone asks for a larger system like that we're not talking unify nvr so it kind of goes outside of the market that i believe they're trying to target they're really focused on that i would say the sweet spot for them is these small 10 camera jobs that we probably installed the most of for this particular setup so the limited mbr choice is also related to the next problem of how do we get the data backed up for longer if they have a really long retention policy that's a pretty problem i wish they'd solve when you do this with the unified protect system they don't have any official ways some will point out there may be unofficial ways but there's no official way to offload all the videos for long-term storage you can only fit whatever drives are supported at this time in there and i see at this time look it up because they're always expanding what their hard drive support is they do support the larger drives but that's still not the same as actually backing it up when we do some of the commercial systems we'll sometimes have a nas system on there so as they have a retention policy to keep these for let's say six months or even longer maybe even a year and that requires a lot of storage it almost always means building a larger system to be able to handle it you are stuck with the four drive limit with their nvr and that's it with no offload option maybe in the future it'd be awesome if unify because they did stick a 10 gig port on this so it's got 10 gig connectivity but no way to offload all of that hopefully someone over at unifi will say hey you know what we could do add that as an option so if anyone over at unifies watching that'll be a cool thing it's i think pretty frequently certainly frequently requested so anyways my overall on this i do like the system we have used it as a replacement for all the clients that we previously sold the unifi video to and as that expired we moved them over to the unified protect we still recommend it to a lot of especially home users who are saying i'm looking for a pretty basic system that doesn't have all these subscription fees but you know i can have all the video locally it doesn't offer too much in a way right now of the smart detection other than vehicles or people but then again that's mostly what you're looking for you don't always want to know other than motion detection if there was a dog in your yard but you may be curious when someone's standing around your building and it does do that well and that is probably the most common detection use that we set up in terms of configuring alerts for people but i have no affiliate links or anything this is not sponsored by or at all associated with unifi i made this on my own so you can buy it direct from unifi but if you need help with consulting uh hit us up on our website we do offer consulting services for setting these up and configuring them but overall you will find them pretty intuitive to use alright thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a shared project head over to lawrences.com and click on the hire us button right at the top to help this channel out in other ways there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated for deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics covered on this channel thank you again and we look forward to hearing from you in the meantime check out some of our other videos you

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 86,547

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, unifi protect review 2021, unifi protect, ubiquiti unifi, security cameras, unifi protect setup, ubiquiti networks, unifi protect review, security cameras for home

Id: Qg3qnzNIK08

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021